Collections and Recollections

by George William Erskine Russell

And now our Minister, seated at his official table, touches his pneumatic bell. His Private Secretary appears with a pile of papers, and the day's work begins. That work, of course, differs enormously in amount, nature, importance, and interest with different offices. To the outside world probably one office is much the same as another, but the difference in the esoteric view is wide indeed. When the Revised Version of the New Testament came out, an accomplished gentleman who had once been Mr. Gladstone's Private Secretary, and had been appointed by him to an important post in the permanent Civil Service, said: "Mr. Gladstone, I have been looking at the Revised Version, and I think it distinctly inferior to the old one."

"Indeed," said Mr. Gladstone, with all his theological ardour roused at once: "I am very much interested to hear you say so. Pray give me an instance."

"Well," replied the Permanent Official, "look at the first verse of the second chapter of St. Luke. That verse used to run, 'There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.' Well, I always thought that a splendid idea—a tax levied on the whole world by a single Act—a grand stroke worthy of a great empire and an imperial treasury. But in the Revised Version I find, 'There went out a decree that all the world should be enrolled'—a mere counting! a census! the sort of thing the Local Government Board could do! Will any one tell me that the new version is as good as the old one in this passage?"

This story aptly illustrates the sentiments with which the more powerful and more ancient departments regard those later births of time, the Board of Trade, the Local Government Board, the Board of Agriculture, and even the Scotch Office—though this last is redeemed from utter contempt by the irritable patriotism of our Scottish fellow-citizens, and by the beautiful house in which it is lodged. For a Minister who loves an arbitrary and single-handed authority the India Office is the most attractive of all. The Secretary of State for India, is (except in financial matters, where he is controlled by his Council) a pure despot. He has the Viceroy at the end of a telegraph-wire, and the Queen's three hundred millions of Indian subjects under his thumb. His salary is not voted by the House of Commons; very few M.P.'s care a rap about India; and he is practically free from Parliamentary control. The Foreign Office, of course, is full of interest, and its social traditions have always been of the most dignified sort—from the days when Mr. Ranville-Ranville used to frequent Mrs. Perkins's Balls to the existing reign of Sir Thomas Sanderson and Mr. Eric Barrington.

The Treasury has its finger in every departmental pie except the Indian one, for no Minister and no department can carry out reforms or even discharge its ordinary routine without public money, and of public money the Treasury is the vigilant and inflexible guardian. "I am directed to acquaint you that My Lords do not see their way to comply with your suggestion, inasmuch as to do so would be to open a serious door." This delightful formula, with its dread suggestion of a flippant door and all the mischief to which it might lead, is daily employed to check the ardour of Ministers who are seeking to advance the benefit of the race (including their own popularity among their constituents) by a judicious expenditure of public money. But whatever be the scope and function of the office, and whatever the nature of the work done there, the mode of doing it is pretty much the same. Whether the matter in question originates inside the office by some direction or inquiry of the chief, or comes by letter from outside, it is referred to the particular department of the office which is concerned with it. A clerk makes a careful minute, giving the facts of the case and the practice of the office as bearing on it. The paper is then sent to any other department or person in the office that can possibly have any concern with it. It is minuted by each, and it gradually passes up, by more or fewer official gradations, to the Under-Secretary of State, who reads, or is supposed to read, all that has been written on the paper in its earlier stages, balances the perhaps conflicting views of different annotators, and, if the matter is too important for his own decision, sums up in a minute of recommendation to the chief. The ultimate decision, however, is probably less affected by the Under-Secretary's minute than by the oral advice of a much more important personage, the Permanent Head of the office.

It would be beyond my present scope to discuss the composition and powers of the permanent Civil Service, whose chiefs have been, at least since the days of Bagehot, recognized as the real rulers of this country. For absolute knowledge of their business, for self-denying devotion to duty, for ability, patience, courtesy, and readiness to help the fleeting Political Official, the permanent chiefs of the Civil Service are worthy of the highest praise. That they are conservative[^[36]] to the core is only to say that they are human. On being appointed to permanent office the extremist theorists, like the bees in the famous epigram, "cease to hum" their revolutionary airs, and settle down into the profound conviction that things are well as they are. All the more remarkable is the entire equanimity with which the Permanent Official accepts the unpalatable decision of a chief who is strong enough to override him, and the absolute loyalty with which he will carry out a policy which he cordially disapproves.

Much of a Minister's comfort and success depends upon his Private Secretary. Some Ministers import for this function a young gentleman of fashion whom they know at home—a picturesque butterfly who flits gaily through the dusty air of the office, making, by the splendour of his raiment, sunshine in its shady places, and daintily passing on the work to unrecognized and unrewarded clerks. But the better practice is to appoint as Private Secretary one of the permanent staff of the office. He supplies his chief with official information, hunts up necessary references, writes his letters, and interviews his bores.

When the late Lord Ampthill was a junior clerk in the Foreign Office, Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, introduced an innovation whereby, instead of being solemnly summoned by a verbal message, the clerks were expected to answer his bell. Some haughty spirits rebelled against being treated like footmen, and tried to organize resistance; but Odo Russell, as he then was, refused to join the rebellious movement, saying that whatever method apprized him most quickly of Lord Palmerston's wishes was the method which he preferred. The aggrieved clerks regarded him as a traitor to his order—but he died an ambassador. Trollope described the wounded feelings of a young clerk whose chief sent him to fetch his slippers; and in our own day a Private Secretary, who had patiently taken tickets for the play for his chief's daughters, drew the line when he was told to take the chief's razors to be ground. But such assertions of independence are extremely rare, and as a rule the Private Secretary is the most cheerful and the most alert of ministering spirits.

But it is time to return from this personal digression to the routine of the day's work. Among the most important of the morning's duties is the preparation of answers to be given in the House of Commons, and it is often necessary to have answers ready by three o'clock to questions which have only appeared that morning on the notice-paper. The range of questions is infinite, and all the resources of the office are taxed in order to prepare answers at once accurate in fact and wise in policy, to pass them under the Minister's review, and to get them fairly copied out before the House meets. As a rule, the Minister, knowing something of the temper of Parliament, wishes to give a full, explicit, and intelligible answer, or even to go a little beyond the strict terms of the question if he sees what his interrogator is driving at. But this policy is abhorrent to the Permanent Official. The traditions of the Circumlocution Office are by no means dead, and the crime of "wanting to know, you know," is one of the most heinous that the M.P. can commit. The answers, therefore, as prepared for the Minister are generally jejune, often barely civil, sometimes actually misleading. But the Minister, if he be a wise man, edits them into a more informing shape, and after a long and careful deliberation as to the probable effect of his words and the reception which they will have from his questioner, he sends the bundle of written answers away to be fair-copied and turns to his correspondence.

And here the practice of Ministers varies exceedingly. Lord Salisbury writes almost everything with his own hand. Mr. Balfour dictates to a shorthand clerk. Most Ministers write a great deal by their Private Secretaries. Letters of any importance are usually transcribed into a copying-book. A Minister whom I knew used to burn the fragment of blotting-paper with which he had blotted his letter, and laid it down as an axiom that, if a constituent wrote and asked a Member to vote for a particular measure, the Member should on no account give a more precise reply than, "I shall have great pleasure in voting in the sense you desire." For, as this expert observed with great truth, "unless the constituent has kept a copy of his letter—and the chances are twenty to one against that—there will be nothing to prove what the sense he desired was, and you will be perfectly safe in voting as you like." The letters received by a Minister are many, various, and surprising. Of course, a great proportion of them relate to public business, and a considerable number to the affairs of his constituency. But, in addition to all this, lunatics, cranks, and impostors mark a Minister for their own, and their applications for loans, gifts, and offices of profit would exhaust the total patronage of the Crown and break the Bank of England.